The Modern Age

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Categoria:	Lingue
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Data:	26.02.2001
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FROM EDWARD VII TO WORLD WAR I
The death of Queen Victoria seemed to mark the end of an era, even if all the attitudes defined as “Victorian” disappeared gradually.
She was succeeded by Edward VII. During his reign there weren’t political changes till the election of Liberal Party. Different reforms were introduced:
- to protect trade unions
- to protect children with medical service in school
- to protect people over 70 with the pension
- introduced the eight hours working day
- were given insurance to the working class
But it was a time of industrial unrest, strikes and violence.
Violence from woman: they were arguing in favour of voting rights for women since the 1860s, but none gave much attention to them until in 1903, when 2 ladies founded the Women’s social and political Union.
An interesting Constitutional development took place when the liberal chancellor Lloyd declared his intention to favour the poor and penalise the rich by taxing “unearned”, but Conservative Party rejected it and a struggle took place in the Parliament that stopped with Parliament Act, which made impossible for the Lords to reject a finance bill and restricted their veto.
FOREIGN POLICY
Europe was divided into 2 rivals camps:
• Triple Alliance: Germany, Austria, Italy
• Triple Entente: Britain, France, Russia
The rivality between Russia and Austria over the Slav State of Serbia led a war when an Austrian archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo. Russia defended Serbia and Germany was against them.
When Germany marched through Belgium, a neutral territory, to attack France, Britain declared war on Germany.
BRITAIN AT WAR
The war caused:
• The ruin of a great empire
• Made possible a communist revolution in Russia
• Prepared the rise of dictators Mussolini and Hitler
The consequences in Britain was:
• Political and economical destruction
• Poverty, unemployment, social unrest
• Industrial crisis
• The loss of Britain leading position on the international scene
The country was unprepared.
At first the soldiers were volunteers, but when they became insufficient a Military service Act forced men to enlist.
Thanks to the American troops Germany surrendered. Peace treaty was signed at Versailles in 1919.
In Geneva were established the League of Nations; it aims were
1. to preserve international peace
2. guarantee all nations against aggressions
but the League had two points of weakness:
1. its constitution was very vague
2. not all the great power were members
It wasn’t a success.
THE 20S AND THE 30S
SOCIETY
THE MODERN AGE
I would like to talk about the years after first world war and why they are defined as a age of anxiety. Generally we talk about anxiety when our future is obscure and we don’t know about something.
The Victorian values disappeared and the mind of Victorian people there the idea that the material gain must be balanced against spiritual loss. The positivistic view of life in progress and science had led believe that all human misery would be swept away.
But first world war was felt like a frustration and nothing seemed to be certain; even science and religion seemed to offer comfort or security; scientist and philosophers destroyed the old universe and new views of man emerged.
FREUD
He discovered the unconscious: not a new idea but he described it in a scientific way giving scientific explanation:
➢ conscious mind is dominated and controlled by reason and works according to reason, logic cause and effect…
➢ unconscious is apart of mind that we cannot control because we don’t know; all our emotions, feelings, impulses, memories are free to associate without a precise order; unconscious mind works according to the Law of free association of ideas and is revealed through analysis of dreams.
JUNG
He was the continuator of Freud’s studies and he introduced the concept of Collective Unconscious: memory contains the beliefs of human race, which operates on a symbolical level: some figures of the everyday world had symbolic power and people respond to them unconsciously.
EINSTEIN
He discovered relativity in science: putting in discussion scientific entities, time and space, he said that they have not an absolute meaning but they are related with a specific point of view.
JAMES AND BERGSON
They questioned the idea of time. The first said that our mind records every experience in a continuum. The second distinguished:
- historical time: external, linear, and measured in terms of spatial distance
- psychological time: internal, subjective, measured by the relative emotional intensity of a moment.
FRAZER
He helped to eliminate the absolute truth of religion and ethical systems in favour of more relativist points of view.

NIETZSCHE
He affirmed that God was dead and that Christians had to lose the faith in a God’s grace. A new alternative to Christianity was esoteric beliefs.
MARX
He had a negative vision of religion and he believed that people used religion to justify injustice and exploitation. He considered religion as the opium of people.
DIFFERENT PICTURES OF MAN
Marx: man was the object of conflicting socio-economic forces and was conditioned by them, so he wasn’t the agent of his destiny but man was dominated by elements he could not control.
Freud: vision of man-object, he is apart of nature a psychological phenomenon.
All the certainties a man believed in fall down and he wasn’t ready to replace the old values with new ones; this generated a deep feeling of anxiety.
In art: the attention shifted from the exterior to interior, from objective to subjective view of existence, so moral and religion became a personal search.
Peter: he said that “experience was reduced to a swam of impressions” and every impression is the impression of the individual in his isolation.
This new sensibility developed radical innovations about form of language.
MODERNISM
It use to define the innovative trends in all the areas of art which emerged in Europe and USA in the first decade of 20th century. It wasn’t characterised by a uniform style but it includes: symbolism, post-impressionism, futurism, expressionism, surrealism…
Modernist artist reacted against the limitation of pessimism and the view which limited the interpretation of the new and complex reality.
Realism and naturalism, that based their faith on scientific analysis and deterministic interpretation of human behaviour, lost their function.
Aestheticism had placed excessive attention on beauty and form as supreme values.
Symbolism gave artist the first impulse to experiment with language techniques to communicate beyond a conventional use:
- used to convey a complex texture of emotions simultaneously
- techniques of illusions, opposition and association
- use of correspondences, symbols
- recourse to musical patterns